Question 6 | What Is An Agent’s Commission?

Jeremy Jenks: Time for more surprise expert commentary. So each week my team enjoys surprising me with questions that would come just like we were sitting in your living room, sitting on your couch, kind of chatting about buying or selling a home, so I’m gonna dig in the box here and we’ll see what we get for this week.

Oh, this is a little bit of a hot potato. What is an agent’s commission? The easiest way to explain this, typically commissions are never fixed, OK? So you can see anything from – there’s different brokerage offices if you’re buying a home or selling a home – that’ll range from 1% to 4 or 5%, and it’s also different across the country.

But the most common commission that we see kind of up and down in our area is around 3%? So if you’re buying a home, typically the seller pays the commission, the 3%’s coming out of the seller proceeds. Your buyer agent, like we’ve talked about in the past, is quote-unquote free to you. That’s a free service that gets provided.

If you’re the seller, you’re paying 3% to your seller’s agent, plus the 3% to the buyer’s agent for a total of 6%. I’ve seen instances where that’s 4-1/2%, 5%, 6%, 7%, so it kind of ranges all over the place.

And the way that breaks down, that 3% is gonna get split. So it’s $100,000 house, we’re talking $3,000. That’s gonna get split with the broker. You know, with any company for any realtor, that could range from 40% to 90%, depending on their current split and what’s going on. Then the agent’s got to pay marketing expenses, they got to pay their overhead expenses, they got to pay their MLS dues. They got to pay any kind of fees and different brokerage fees that are involved, and at the end of the day, what’s left might be $500 or $1,000, and that’s kind of their paycheck for that particular deal.

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